


Place of Origin

by Arsenic, arsenicarcher (Arsenic)



Series: 14 Valentines [13]
Category: Avatar (2009)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-30
Updated: 2010-07-30
Packaged: 2020-09-28 13:53:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20427053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsenic/pseuds/Arsenic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsenic/pseuds/arsenicarcher
Summary: Trudy wasn't her birth name





	Place of Origin

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [14 valentines challenge](http://14valentines.livejournal.com), theme "International"

Trudy wasn't her birth name. She didn't remember what was, just that Trudy hadn't been it. She'd just turned five when troops seized the Dominican. She supposed she was lucky. She'd been put in a school, given three meals a day, and she didn't mind joining the military at eighteen. It got her out of the compound, in any case, and they taught her to fly helicopters. There weren't as many politics in the sky, just air and orders and an engine at her control.

When she'd gotten the offer, Pandora had seemed like a pretty good idea: lots of money and _lots_ of sky.

*

Trudy agreed to run supplies for the doc to the school because people who looked different didn't scare her. If they had, she would never have survived--most of the people she'd served with hadn't looked much like her at all. She couldn't say why she was expecting the school to be like the one she had come out of, except that it made sense: English culture immersion for non-English speakers, pretty universal, right?

Only, when she would touch down, sometimes the doc brought a few of the others with her to help carry the supplies back to wherever the school was actually located, and Trudy saw how Augustine interacted with her students, how she seemed to learn as much from them, even in the simple act of a supply run, as they did from her. And the Navi, well, it was embarrassing, but they reminded her of a book she had read as a child, over and over again. There had been fairies, lithe and blue and...not so far off from what she saw in front of her, really.

When the Navi refused to let Dr. Augustine come anymore, Trudy found herself missing being able to watch them, if only for a little bit of time each week. She missed their soft, lilting English, and the colorful, looping sounds of their own language. Mostly, she missed those few moments when she felt perfectly at home on the ground.

*

When she made the decision to break Jake and the others out, Trudy had less than a year left on her contract. Then she was home free, back to Earth, with her paycheck that could get her through a few years of not even having to work. She didn't think she wouldn't work--to fucking restless by half--but she _could_. Only, the night before, with Jake and Grace and Norm holed up in the brig, she'd closed her eyes to see nothing but blood.

She'd opened them, but eventually they'd slipped shut, eventually they'd let her dreams in, and then it was the trees that were bleeding. She wasn't any less sickened when she woke up. Her breath came short, like it used to when she was a child, in the cold of Jersey winters, unused to that kind of deep freeze. For a second she almost reached for one of the masks, but she was in the compound. The air was perfectly breathable--probably moreso than anything left on Earth.

She took a deep breath, and went to go find out who was supposed to feed the prisoners.

*

She knew how Jake felt in his avatar's body. It was the same way Trudy felt every time she was at the controls of a helicopter. That, if nothing else, was why she trusted him. People who were at home made better decisions than those on alien soil, and as of yet, other than the Navi themselves, Jake was the only person Trudy had found who knew how to locate home, here.

In the Hallelujah mountains, with her sensors blind and everything depending on her eyesight, her instincts, her reflexes, Trudy thought that maybe, maybe, it wasn't just about right or wrong, or blood on her hands, or people who looked like fairies. That maybe it was about home for her, a little bit, too. Pandora, after all, had more sky than any place she'd ever been. And it asked more of those who flew in it than the one over America or Malaysia or Chile or any of the other places she'd seen action.

Maybe she owed this place something for herself.


End file.
